The present invention relates to a new and improved construction of a cartridge feed system for an automatic gun, which is of the type comprising a gun magazine or drum possessing a number of chambers, the drum magazine being mounted to be rotatable about a drum shaft secured to the gun mount and indexably or step-wise driven, and further includes a first feed device which moves the cartridges in each case out of one of the chambers of the drum magazine, such feed device being arranged stationarily externally of the drum magazine.
With a prior art cartridge feed system of this general type, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,683,743, the drum magazine is arranged extremely close to the automatic gun and it is not possible to fire without interruption more cartridges than are contained in a chamber, since each time when the drum is rotated through one switching or indexing step for the purpose of bringing the next successive chamber into its work position, there arises an interruption in the feed of the ammunition to the gun or weapon. Since there can only be stacked a limited number of cartridges in the individual chambers, the aforementioned state-of-the-art system is associated with the drawback that there cannot be carried out any long series of firing operations. When employing the automatic gun as an anti-aircraft weapon there are however required long firing series in order to obtain a high hit efficiency of the aircraft.